day no. 17,389: free to give and costly to get back

"Freedom is already being lost in a network of police prohibition... English liberty may well be entirely lost. I should not write this if I did not think that it may also be saved. But I could not write it without recording my own conviction that there is only one way of saving it." ― G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1920)

Freedom can be freely given away, but it cannot be taken back that way. 

Galatians 5:1

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

If you have been set free, you must resist the temptation to use your freedom to enslave yourself. Freedom is full of responsibility and that can be a heavy burden to carry, so heavy that some opt for the weight of chains. They prefer bondage and endless bureaucracy to the weight of personal responsibility and endless liberty.

John 10:9

I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.

When attempt to break yourself free from the kingdom of Christ, you break away from the kingdom of freedom. You do not find open prairie beyond the fence, you find the abyss. Inside the fence through the narrow gate, there is space to play, but outside the gate and beyond the fence is only the void.

"We have lost our national instincts because we have lost the idea of that Christendom from which the nations came. In freeing ourselves from Christianity, we have only freed ourselves from freedom. We shall not now return to a merely heathen hilarity, for the new heathenism is anything but hilarious." ― G.K. Chesterton, The Illustrated London News (1920)

There is no heathen hilarity waiting to embrace those who adopt a libertarian pipe dream. There is no freedom at the end of the road of every man doing what is right in his own eyes. You do not get Heaven on earth like that, you get the book of Judges. If we are to be free, we must return to Freedom. He is the way, the truth, and the life and no one comes to the Father or to freedom but through Him. Getting back to Christ will cost us a lot. Not just something, but everything. And if we are not willing to give up whatever gains we imagine we have found without Him, we will never get back to the font of freedom that gave us the freedom in the first place.